Conceptualizing and Contextualizing the Concept of Refugee in Education: A Phenomenological Study of Teachers’ and Students’ Perceptions in a Conflict-Affected Society

The aim of this study was to investigate Greek-Cypriot primary school teachers’ and students’ perceptions of the concept of refugee using a phenomenological-interpretive framework. The value of a phenomenological study was to gain a deeper understanding of the roots of participants’ perceptions of refugeehood as well as how those perceptions were connected to participants’ feelings about refugees. Data collection involved a total of 40 interviews—20 interviews with teachers and 20 interviews with students. Against legal definitions of refugee and internally displaced people, it is shown that participants’ understandings were rooted in their lived experiences of uprootedness, of loss of home, and of lack of belonging. The study makes a contribution in understanding the complexities and tensions between legal definitions and the situatedness of the concept of refugee in lived experiences. Contextualizing the concept of refugee can create pedagogical spaces for the affective dimension in teacher professional development, which is critical to understanding the lived experience of refugees in more complex and nuanced ways, especially within conflict-affected settings.